Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday September 18, 2010 @10:50AM
from the onward-and-upward dept.

Anssi55 writes "As most of the Mandriva employees working on the Linux distribution were laid off due to the liquidation of Edge-IT (a subsidiary of Mandriva SA) and trust in the company has diminished, the development community (including the core developers) has decided to fork the project. The new Linux distribution, named Mageia, will be managed by a not-for-profit organization that will be set up in the coming days. There are already many people that have decided to follow the fork, but the people behind it are still welcoming any help offered in the various tasks related to establishing the new distribution."

Why do OS developers and other free software creators always pick user unfriendly names. When ever someone who knows nothing about free software/linuix asks me what free alternatives they could use I get a weird look from them when I tell them about Thunderbird, Firefox, Ubuntu, Amarok, Gimp and etc...

Powerpoint says something about what you do with it and conveys positive imagery - it's powerful, it's something you point at (a presentation). Excel - it doesn't really say what it is, but it conveys the idea of speed and success, which are important in business. Likewise with Quicken - they verbed an adjective (quick) that means something, and while potentially having some strange linguistic associations (quicken/quickening is the moment in pregnancy when a fetus' mo

yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Rule #1: Make it easy to pronounce so people aren't afraid to look stupid saying the name wrong. You think you are going to get critical mass with Ubuntu? Think again.

Excel and Powerpoint aren't great, but their main brand was Microsoft Office until they got brand recognition on their own.

Incorrect and backwards.

Excel and PowerPoint had both been successful stand-alone products for several years before "Microsoft Office" was conceived, as a bundle (with Word) of three popular, name-brand products at a lower total price. At the time, Excel had just overtaken 1-2-3 as the best-selling spreadsheet program, and this was an effort at coattails-style marketing synergy, as avid Word users would become Excel and PowerPoint users, Excel fans would switch to Word and Powerpoint, etc. What Microsoft would lose in revenue they'd gain in market share, a tactic that contributed to the decline of WordPerfect, Borland, and Lotus, and Microsoft's near-monopoly on commercial office suites.

This was around the same time that Microsoft started making "Microsoft" part of the official names of the applications, amalgamating its line of popular individual software products into a monolithic brand: not just "Microsoft's spreadsheet program, Excel" but "the spreadsheet program Microsoft Excel". This went further as "Microsoft Excel" became "Microsoft Office Excel". (And if not for the anti-vertical-integration court cases, I suspect it would be bundled as "Microsoft Office Windows Excel" by now.)

Well, Thunderbird and Firefox are a lot more userfriendly than your average car brand name or medication, yet the cars are bought. F-150, Escape Hybrid, E-series... not very userfriendly. Yet popular.zafirlukast, rabeprazole, fexofenadine - even less userfriendly. Yet very popular

The gimp name is a marketing nightmare and probably has caused the software to be banned from more corporations than the developers realize.

No, these names are English. That is not userfriendly but culturally biased.

Don't forget that Mandriva was in negotiations to get Russian state contracts. To me it looks like the Russians will simply sack Mandriva. The new distribution on a community/non-profit base is a perfect counter-weight.

Stussy used to be a popular clothing brand, despite sounding very close to the slang word for "vagina".
People had the word proudly displayed on their chest in 5 inch high letters.
And have you ever seen G-unit clothing? You can't tell me it doesn't look like it says cunt.

Definition 3 also happens to be the one most people are familiar with. GIMP is a *horrible* name for that reason, and I can tell you that, while not banned, I had a manager look at me and say, "No, we'll just buy Photoshop," one time when I suggested "Why not just grab a copy of Gimp from the web to get the intern working on some of these images you want?"

Yeah, I'll get right on wasting my time worrying about the branding of some software that I don't care a thing about. If you don't want people calling it "GIMP", don't name it "GIMP."

If you're saying that "GNU Image Processor" would be a "friendlier" name, then you're also implying that the term 'GIMP' will, at the very least raise a few eyebrows or cause a few snickers. And if that's the reaction you want for your software, that's fine. But if you want it to be seen as a viable alternative to a well-kno

Because my boss wanted to get the intern set up quickly, so I suggested what I knew to be a "quick / decent" tool for them to do some image editing in.

Whether or not it got used is irrelevant to me, but it is relevant to this discussion, where somebody was claiming that nobody would refuse to use it based on a poor name choice. I can offer at least one example of a time that it *did* get passed over for exactly that reason.

About GIMP
Introduction to GIMP
GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching p

The other thing to keep in mind is that for better or worse, Photoshop is the more familiar tool, so companies can rely the artists being familiar with it, not to mention it is a more polished tool. GIMP may have the technical capability to perform most Photoshop tasks, but it can be more of a pain to use.

Considering that the GIMP does not give productivity benefits over Photoshop, does not have an excellent reputation for quality (unlike say Apache), and the cost of a Photoshop license is rather small in b

Funny, my company uses Apache, Tomcat, Perl, Python, PHP, Linux, GCC, Java, Eclipse, and a host of other FOSS software & tools. This has nothing to do with licensing or purchasing policies.

This was me, suggesting something to my manager, after which he looked at me like I had suggested we engage in a little light tickling - just for fun! - and then said, "No, let's just use Photoshop." The name gets an immediate response, and it's sometimes not a positive one.

Yeah, do you really want to be the one running around proclaiming the year of DILDOS on the desktop, or DILDOS on the phone, or DILDOS on the camera? Or heaven forbid, motherfucking DILDOS on a motherfucking plane?

I just don't think I'd really care to work in an IT shop that used nothing but DILDOS... IT is a male dominate field, we have more than enough dicks without importing fake ones.

"appeal to internet dictionary"? Dude, it's called a citation - it's not just a slang reference that somebody picked up from Pulp Fiction, 'gimp' is a legitimate word, referring to a limp. That's all that was intended to demonstrate - I'm not saying those other definitions aren't also legitimate, but let's be honest: ask somebody to define a "gimp", and see what the overwhelming response is - hint: most people aren't horsemen, or tailors.

And I think you can extend that to names that don't actually infringe trademarks, but is sufficiently close that someone would make a trademark lawsuit. Very few open source projects have the resources to fight over a name, even if they would eventually get the case dismissed.

The trademark minefield and the growing exhaustion of the domain namespace are both culprits. It's increasingly true that "all of the good ones are taken".

But still.... "Mageia"?

Auto makers have the same problem, and yet they still (usually) manage to invent brand names that consumers will find easy to remember and easy to pronounce. "Mageia" is not. (I just had to look up to confirm the spelling, not a good sign.) A combination of three vowels in a row is confusing: do you pronounce each one? blend the

yeah! If a name can cause a project to be ill-fated we're looking at one here. At least choose a name that suggests a dominant pronunciation to your target audience. Even "manbearpig" would've been a better choice.

I would agree. The fascination with recursive acronyms and "cute" names for mainstream products is not helping acceptance. Gimp is a good example, as it actually a good program that runs fine on Windows, but when people who want a photo editing program ask me for a free "photoshop" and I tell them "Gimp", they look at me like I just farted at the dinner table: Shocked and somewhat disgusted.

Hey, if you code the program, you can call it what you want, but if your goal is to get as many people using your s

Because they can't afford the super-expensive PR people that excel (no pun intended) at that...

Choosing a name is not as easy as most people think. There's a lot of psychology that goes behind a brand name that marketing and PR experts are best at exploiting. Additionally, most software developers aren't known for their UI creativity...

Traditionally, a proprietary fork has always been a bad thing. However, there's not so much evidence for that in open source. Most of the time the two forks take ideas from each other, both advancing faster till the stage where one of them stagnates and hands over it's features to the other.

From the user point of view this is great; you don't get data lock in because the source code always lets you see how the formats work; you do get much faster advancing software and it doesn't even really matter which fork you pick (though going with the community rather than the company has always been a good pick; just beware that often the community is with the company).

Just because forks are bad in proprietary software doesn't mean the same here.

Sometimes, sometimes it looks like they just duplicated effort moving at much slower speed like the radeon/radeonhd drivers. Branching is a quite necessary tool in OSS, diverging forks not so much. That usually just means there's too different goals or too much ego on one and the same project. That doesn't include the forks where pretty much all the development switches to a fork, like say xorg fork where the xfree project was essentially dead. Or some other not development-related stuff happening like MySQ

From the user point of view this is great; you don't get data lock in because the source code always lets you see how the formats work; you do get much faster advancing software and it doesn't even really matter which fork you pick (though going with the community rather than the company has always been a good pick; just beware that often the community is with the company).

I've given a great deal of thought to this connundrum, though I'd actually call it a bit of a paradox.

Why a paradox? Because, quite frankly, it's not that simple.

Just because the source is available and there are forks and something continues to be maintained does not mean your options are clear cut, easy, or cheap. It does not mean that compatibility remains. It's the same with dead proprietary software.

Yes, you could just keep using the same thing, year over year, because it "still works". But where does

No, they should merge all the good features of Ubuntu into Mandriva. That way you would not only have a good distro, but it would be one that wouldn't bail out during the install and would actually work with damn near any hardware you throw at it (i.e. Dell BCM43 chips - last time I tried to get one of those on Ubuntu it took _days_. On Mandriva it just worked.)

It would be stupid to try work with Ubuntu as they are not upstream friendly, they do not develope software and they do not care about the community. Mandriva was totally different when compared to Canonical.Mandriva even is more user friendly at 2010.1 than Ubuntu is with 10.10 (beta). When it comes to handling a hardware, networks or multimedia, Mandriva wins. Only thing where Ubuntu goes around is the amount of packages and that goes in rare ones. Mandriva package repos had almost all what was needed, wh

Mandrake was a very easy to use and user friendly release of RedHat Linux, similar to how Ubuntu is an easier and more friendly version of Debian. Mandrake had a good following back in the day and I remember it being very easy to use.

I think that it would be best if they do their own thing and see what they come up with, not only because their base distros are completely different but because they could bring in new ideas. I'm hoping Mageia will be able to come up with a fresh user friendly Linux that can b

I think it's loss in popularity has less to do with Ubuntu being what it is and more to do with how badly openSUSE fell apart in the 10.x releases. It went from being one of the most solid and user-friendly distros to failing its own dependency checks and making codecs more difficult to install. That was quite sad as it pioneered in taking the approach of providing codecs in the repos where they couldn't ship on the disc.

...and enabling by default that zenworks or whatever management daemon that broke things to the left and right, and installing beagle by default that resulted in seriously shitty performance. luckily, both of those things are gone in latest versions:)

ok, they still managed to fuckup things recently - they disabled touchpad tapping in installation environment, and desktop environments by default (from what i read, initially because gnome defaulted to it disabled).

I would recommend helping openSUSE instead. Many technologies are similar and openSUSE is, in my opinion, one of the most nicely rounded distributions - it's just not the popular one.

Yeah, I wonder why.

Maybe because they don't come with repositories configured like ALL OTHER DISTRIBUTIONS out there, for NO REASON. And it's a PAIN to find the addresses, a PAIN to use Yast to pull from them (proxies, non intuitive dialogs, etc, etc)

You can easily select "community repositories" from YaST. No need to know addresses and everything. And zypper, the package management tool (command-line), is also quite powerful nowadays. Plus, you have the openSUSE Build Service to make your own packages (and with kde-obs-generator you can make ones without knowing too much about packaging as well), openSUSE and other distros alike.

There is always the question: Diversify or focus? However, we do not need redundant diversity. Basically, in order to decide if it is worth keeping a separate distro, we should determine if Mandriva had any goals that were unique. If not, by all means merge. However, if there is something unique about Mandriva (I haven't used it, I have no idea), than some effort should be made to preserve those unique goals. I am guessing that the people who are forking the project feel that it is worth keeping Mandriva al

As a former Mandriva user (now on Arch) - there is very much a need for Mandriva to continue. It's the distro I always recommend to newbies, and as far as I know it's the only distro that is both extremely user-friendly and has excellent hardware support. I've seen far too many people give up on Linux because Ubuntu didn't like some piece of hardware. For a newbie's first Linux distro, you need to have at least basic support for _all_ hardware straight from the install. I've never seen Mandriva fail at that...and I've also never seen Ubuntu succeed.

As a former Mandriva user (now on Arch) - there is very much a need for Mandriva to continue. It's the distro I always recommend to newbies, and as far as I know it's the only distro that is both extremely user-friendly and has excellent hardware support. I've seen far too many people give up on Linux because Ubuntu didn't like some piece of hardware. For a newbie's first Linux distro, you need to have at least basic support for _all_ hardware straight from the install. I've never seen Mandriva fail at that...and I've also never seen Ubuntu succeed.

This never ceases to amaze me about Linux. If Mandrake has such amazing hardware support, why the hell don't all the other distros have the same level of support. It's all open source right?

The base system can be rock-solid, but the part exposed to users (and tweaked for the distro) can be broken. My experience is that the Ubuntu developers often break something (e.g., wireless) while trying to redesign the UI. A few releases back wireless stopped working for me. I found I could connect using barebones wpa_supplicant (a PITA to create the correct conf file, but it worked), but Network-manager was a mess. Slowly this got sorted out and NM now works for me.

Opensuse is another user friendly distro that will install almost on anything. I remember I had a particularly non-mainstream laptop at one time and all my attempts at installing a distro failed (I had started from debian and went on...) until a friend suggested Suse. Well, being a KDE person and also hearing about problems on Ubuntu installations that my friends had (flash, sound most common) which I had never encountered I just stuck with Suse. I understand that due to Novel having a sort of a relationshi

Fedora's way too experimental compared to Mandriva. There's no reason for MDV to merge with Fedora as Mandriva has always been a lot more stable and conservative as compared to Fedora.

That is because Fedora is to RHEL as other distributions "testing" is to "stable". On Red Hat style distributions, if you want stability (without the support costs), you use CentOS or Scientific Linux. If you want to be bleeding edge (like I do on my personal system), you use the latest version of Fedora (I am not so "bleed

* make Linux and free software straightforward to use for everyone; * provide integrated system configuration tools;
* keep a high-level of integration between the base system, the desktop (KDE/GNOME) and applications; especially improve third-parties (be it free of proprietary software) integration;
* target new architectures and form-factors;
* improve our understanding of computers and electronics devices users.

How is this different from lots of other distros we already have? PCLinuxOS, Mint Linux, Kubuntu/Ubuntu...? They should call it YADL (Yet Another Desktop Linux). Shouldn't they be trying to do something different? How about a user friendly version of a fast/lite Linux. Something like Arch Linux or Gentoo with a GUI installer maybe? Or a mandriva fast and lite distro? The Mandriva-like equivalent of something like Lubuntu. If someone wants bloated, slow, but easy to use they can just install Windows 7, or W

Mandrake/Mandriva has been by far, the best KDE oriented linux distro, amd one the most user friendly. I hope Mageia keeps the good things on! Go Mageia!

A very subjective statement - users of Slackware and OpenSUSE and even Kubuntu might disagree.

I havent tried it in awhile but it always aimed at somewhat the same audience as Ubuntu, only based on RH infrastructure rather than Debian, and defaulting to KDE rather than Gnome. It's good to have choices, even if that makes the assessment of 'the best' more di

Kubuntu is probably THE distro that is responsible for the bad name KDE4 got...

That sounds odd considering that Kubuntu's KDE install is pretty much the same as if you installed KDE from unaltered source on any distribution. All of KDE4's default settings are at least somewhat questionable. Somebody said that if you take a clean KDE4 install, open up Dolphin, and check the options, pretty much all are set to the oposite of what you would want.

I did so, and agreed that the vast majority of the default Boolean settings were the reverse of what I would want.

kubuntu... not really. whenever i tried it, kubuntu did not really live up to the promise of being a usable kde distro.

slackware is quite a different thing (and i'm saying that as a slackware user). while things are much more automated than in the early days, that's still quite different from what other distributions on your list deliver (or promise to deliver).

opensuse would probably be the closest, especially given them both being based on rpm. one thing where mandriva/drake/mageuiaieuia might be more sen

PCLinuxOS is a Mandriva variant which works beautifully on PCs and is indispensable to me for use on my netbook.
Mandriva itself is also great on netbooks.
A primary example, that illustrates that Mandriva makes an excellent base to build other distros on. Mandriva seemed to produce solutions that were a breath of fresh air in comparison to the straight-thinking Ubuntu. No criticism of Ubuntu intended here. It's also a big favourite of mine.
Remains to be seen though if PCLinuxOs can still produce the goods

Am I the only person here still using Mandriva? It certainly would explain why some bug reports I've filed seem to have taken forever for anyone to look at them, and even longer for a fix.

Now which distro to support, Mandriva or the new fork?

I settled on Mandrake (as it was then) when it was known as bleeding edge, run on just about anything, and the most user friendly of the installations (with a decent partition manager when installing so you don't install into the wrong place / drive).

No, you're not the only one. I use Mandriva extensively, even paying for it plus donating piles of bandwidth (on a real server, not something in a closet in my house) to the project, and for one simple reason. It works. It works correctly. Every time. And it does it right out of the box.

I've never been able to get everyone's darling Ubuntu to install on any hardware I own *even once* without banging on it. Same goes for Suse and Fedora. And I don't have bleeding edge hardware. My feeling is that (unlike

What does the current health of Mandriva mean for Scalix [scalix.com]? Scalix is possibly the best alternative to Microsoft Echange right now, for organizations who have grown to expect Exchange groupware functionality but want to get away from Microsoft's convoluted, nickle-and dime licensing schemes.

So now you resort to ad hominem attacks? Who's escalating now? Please explain why you think that pointing out something that I believe is clearly a defect - and easily changed - makes me a "bringer of destruction".When something is very unusual, the normal, instant reaction is to find something familiar in it. If the first association is distasteful, that can leave a lasting impression, which can only be overcome with considerable difficulty. I still have to contend with jokes about Mandriva whereas all my

I've already explained the why in previous posts; feel free to re-read them. Sure, naming things can be difficult but millions of people and companies manage it, even if it takes several tries.Firefox is a case in point.If they need help with a name or logo, I'm sure the community would be delighted to offer suggestions. This has worked for many projects in the past - I believe the one or more of the BSDs have used this in the last couple of years. And, considering that so many of the former Mandrake people

I am really saddened by the news. I have used Mandriva as my primary distro for several years, and every time I've tried any other distro I've always come back to Mandriva. There just is something so wrong in every distro that none of them can compare to it. Sure, it has its own niggles but overall it has less sharp corners than the competition and the corners aren't as lethal either. Now with all the core devs gone Mandriva is going to die and I don't know what distro to migrate to...:'(